> Let's again see if we can take personhood out of the abortion
> equation in a civil-suit context. Can there be damages if no real
> person is harmed?
If there's no victim, there's no crime, right? That seems to be a
proposition on which most libertarians agree, and I think it's
applicable to the abortion debate.
And, in most libertarian theories, only "persons" can be "victims."
Anything that's not a person is, at most, property, so the only way
there could be a tort is if the property belongs to someone other than
the person damaging it or freely allowing it to be damaged (then that
owner, not the property, would be the "victim").
I can see specific cases in which abortion would definitely constitute
a tort*, but those cases don't provide any over-arching basis for a
general libertarian pro-life argument.
Tom Knapp
* For example, two parties (a man and a woman) contract with a third
party (a woman). The first two parties provide an embryo (which they
created from the man's sperm and the woman's egg). The third party
agrees, for a fee or other consideration, to carry the fetus to term
on their behalf. Then she changes her mind and has an abortion. This,
at the very least would be breach of contract, but if the embryo/fetus
itself is appraised at a higher value than the service of carrying it,
then there's also a property damage tort involved.
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